Michael Kratsios on the New Golden Age of American Science | EP #276

**Peter Diamandis** (0:00)
I was a kid in the candy store reading the Golden Age Report. What you're describing there is a complete fundamental AI native, AI agent up re-imagining of the entire scientific process.

**Michael Kratsios** (0:11)
And I think it's something that is possible. My sense is...

**Peter Diamandis** (0:15)
This is the Golden Age of America.

**Michael Kratsios** (0:19)
AI is a technology that is gonna impact every agency, whether you're flying drones, whether you're doing AI-powered medical diagnostics, whether you're like in at the SEC and working on financial services. AI is gonna impact every single one of you.

**Peter Diamandis** (0:30)
Do you have sort of a longer term compelling vision of what you think America could be like?

**Michael Kratsios** (0:36)
We as a government need to be opinionated about what the most important things are for the future of our nation. I mean, we're going, putting man back on the moon in 28 We're gonna be able to build the first elements of a lunar base by 30 We're gonna put a nuclear reactor in space by 28 I mean, that's crazy.

**Peter Diamandis** (0:53)
Yeah, okay, my favorite idea. It falls into the crazy idea. I can't believe Michael actually wrote this down. All right.

**Michael Kratsios** (1:02)
Now, that's the Moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

**Peter Diamandis** (1:07)
Welcome to Moonshots, everybody. Today, I had the pleasure of interviewing a friend, Michael Kratsios. He's the 13th Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Science Advisor to President Trump. Michael is the principal architect behind three landmark initiatives that are shaping America's acceleration during the Singularity. The first is America's AI Action Plan, the administration's roadmap for winning the global AI race. The second is Genesis Mission, a Manhattan Project style effort to accelerate breakthrough discoveries, and then most recently, Science and You Golden Age, his blueprint for rewarding bold, unconventional ideas and dramatically increasing the rate of scientific discovery. So this is the spot. This is it. Yeah.

**Don Musalem** (1:49)
You go up and do the briefing.

**Peter Diamandis** (1:55)
Ladies and gentlemen, I've called you here today to let you know that we have now officially approved a trillion dollar science budget.
Congratulations. We're going to be solving every problem on the planet within the next four years of this administration.

**Michael Kratsios** (2:12)
Great job. Yeah.

**Peter Diamandis** (2:13)
Thank you so much. Well done.

**Michael Kratsios** (2:14)
One day we'll make that announcement.

**Peter Diamandis** (2:18)
This interview takes place at the White House and I'm asking these questions on behalf of myself and my Moonshot mates. All right, let's jump in. Enjoy. So Michael, we are arguably living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history where science and technology is hyper exponential and you're in the thick of it. You're in the middle of it, right? Ray Kurzweil predicts we're going to see as much progress in the next decade as we've seen in the last century. And that's like going from the Ford Model T, the Starship, in the next 10 years.
On top of that, we're on the edge of AGI, maybe the next three years, ASI.
How does the government process ever keep up with that?

**Michael Kratsios** (3:06)
You know, we're trying our best.
It's something that I think, generally, governments have struggled with for a long, long time. And I think what we have to do is make sure that areas where we are seeing this tremendous growth, that we allow the regulatory system around them to exist in such a fashion that it doesn't get in the way of this progress. You know, I typically think of technologies kind of in two buckets. There are technologies that are either born free or they're born in captivity. So born free technologies are things like the Internet was in 1990s. And the best thing the government can do in those situations is to step back, get out of the way, don't jump into...

**Peter Diamandis** (3:44)
I think it happened so fast that you didn't have a chance to get in the way.

**Michael Kratsios** (3:46)
Yeah. Well, there was an issue. It was a bill passed in 1996 It was essentially like Bill Clinton was behind it. It was kind of bipartisan. And I think it kind of allowed some of this stuff to kind of take hold. But I think this extends for a lot of technologies. You know, be careful before you start regulating.
An example of that is in AI. And I think this always comes up when I think about AI regs. You know, the EU AI Act was passed and finalized by the EU Commission before CHAT GPT was even invented. So there's no way that what they have today actually applies to the LLM of today. But I think that the second types of technologies are the ones that we pay particular attention to, because those are the ones that we actually have to take action on. And those are technologies that are born in captivity. Think of commercial drone operations. Think of AI-powered medical diagnostics. These are technologies that cannot be commercialized. They will not be, their benefits will not be realized by the American people unless the government affirmatively does something. And those are places where you have to be really careful, because if you wait too long or you aren't thinking about them, it actually holds up progress. So first we kind of think of these two buckets of work and make sure that for technologies of born in captivity, we're thoughtfully approaching, you know, how you can change the regulatory structure to allow that to ultimately be safely deployed to Americans.